Using speculative execution for fault tolerance in a real-time system

Achieving fault-tolerance using a primary-backup approach involves overhead of recovery such as activating the backup and propagating execution states, which may affect the timeliness properties of real-time systems. We propose a semi-passive architecture for fault-tolerance and show that speculative execution can enhance overall performance and hence shorten the recovery time in the presence of failure. The compiler is used to detect speculative execution, to insert check-points and to construct the updated messages. Simulation results are reported to show the contribution of speculative execution under the proposed architecture.